Touchstone (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “But we were going to keep it all secret,” Nordhausen protested. “Keep it to ourselves.”

  “Someone had to learn about it or they could not have pulled Kelly to safety in the first place. We have to look at this clearly, Robert. One side used us to help them reverse Palma. The other side is fighting back. Maybe it’s Rasil, or his masters. Maybe it’s Sinan and his Assassins. This sure is a devious way to try and do in Kelly—just like something the Assassins might dream up.”

  “So now what?” The professor flapped his arms against the cold. “Whoever took it, can destroy it, if they haven’t already. My god, what if Kelly’s gone?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Paul. He was suddenly excited. “Because this wasn’t the only copy. There still must be a data somewhere on the archives at the lab. We’ve got to get over there! We have to go and burn a hundred DVDs of Kelly, and stash them everywhere. Put it on a Yahoo server somewhere as hidden code on a web page. Make it part of Kelly’s Golem program—anything to insure that the copy will survive. We have to publish this information so much that it can be always available…not hide it! Publish it! We had it all wrong. The only way to maintain his probability is to assert it vigorously.”

  9

  On the road back they began to sort out the problem of who took the DVD. The night had calmed, although thin tails of clouds were still rushing aloft. The moon loomed in a cobalt blue sphere, with bright white stars dotting the sky overhead as the storm front passed.

  Nordhausen said suddenly: “It’s clear now that there are other people moving through time.”

  “I was afraid you were going to bring that up,” said Paul. “It’s a lot to start thinking about just now.”

  “Well, we can’t avoid it. Someone physically dug up Kelly’s DVD and stole it. No one knew about that except the four of us.”

  “No one in this milieu. But they were the ones who rescued Kelly in the first place, so at some future time the existence and location of the DVD becomes a known fact.”

  “Exactly,” Nordhausen said excitedly. “We assumed they excavated it decades from now, and found the DVD, and had the idea to save Kelly. But now, look, we are going to try to make it so they don’t have to dig up the grave. So we don’t know how they found it… Maybe someone stole it, and they got it from them? Maybe they came back in time, and picked it up now, instead of in their own time. Suppose this is how they found it, perhaps only just hours ago because of what we’re about to do.”

  Dorland interrupted him. “That’s the same Schroedinger’s Cat argument. But it’s a gross analogy trying to describe a quantum puzzle. Don’t worry. It doesn’t mean anything, it just makes you think. Niels Bohr said the cat existed in both states, alive and dead, until you opened the box, and then the probability collapsed into certainty, and the cat was either alive or dead. But the Many-Worlds theory says that at the moment a particle can or cannot emit, it does both, and each one sets off another fork in the universe, one with a dead cat and one with a live cat.”

  “Well, you tell me,” Nordhausen shot back, “is Kelly alive or dead?”

  “He seems to be in both states, before our very eyes. Schroedinger said there is a difference between an out of focus photograph and a snapshot of fog and clouds.” Dorland was pensive, “He proposed the original thought experiment to show that it was not possible to separate a superposition, it had to collapse… But in 1996, the National Institute of Standards and Technology managed to separate a single ion of beryllium into two states at a measurable distance of 80 nanometers.”

  “More physics? What is that supposed to mean?”

  Dorland rolled his eyes miserably. “I have no idea. Still, it seems to me that as long as we have Kelly physically here, and we make certain that there is a data set easily available for Graves’ colleagues to rescue him, then Kelly ought to maintain his integrity in this Meridian.”

  Nordhausen was eager to agree. Then his thinking transitioned to the other problem that had been vexing him all night. “What about the hieroglyphics?”

  “The hieroglyphics?”

  “The hieroglyphics! The Rosetta Stone. And the other time travelers. If I didn’t cause the damage then they must have been running a mission themselves. That’s what triggered the alert—not my time jaunt.”

  “Possibly.” Dorland was content to swim in uncertainty for a moment. “We’ll get over to the lab and see what the Golems have for us.”

  Nordhausen pulled out his phone. “I’m calling Maeve to see how Kelly is. Maybe even our resolve to do this is enough to help him—even before it happens.”

  “Good point,” Paul agreed, realizing that they were about to look into another box with the call. His heart was heavy when he thought of Kelly again.

  Robert got through on the first ring, and gave a brief account of what they were planning. Kelly appeared to be no better, although he seemed to be resting comfortably.

  Dorland whispered, “Tell her to meet us at your apartment in Berkeley. We can confer there. And use the code.”

  The professor tried to remember. “Oh, yes,” he said. “And say hello to Alexandria.” It was a reference to a novel he had been writing on the destruction of the famous library in that city—and a fitting metaphor for his holding in Berkeley, as they had all agreed.

  He switched off the phone with a visible sigh. “I don’t think she took that code business too well.”

  ~

  This arrangement made, the men drove to the facility at Lawrence Berkeley Labs with as much speed as Paul could safely manage. They pulled into the rain swept parking lot a half hour later and rushed through the security station to the Lab. By the time they pushed through the door, they were breathless with the energy and excitement of their mission.

  “You work the DVD thing,” Paul yelled. “I’ll check on the Golems.”

  “Where do I start?” Nordhausen gave him a blank look.

  “The blue system at the far left of the main control room. You know the one?”

  “Yes, but what do I do?”

  “Just do a search for any .MPEG file. You’ll find it. Make copies and publish. Use your imagination!” He rushed away, heading for the RAM bank center where he hoped the Golems would have news for him.

  Robert located the data file on the archival storage system, and spent the next couple hours copying it on every available type of media he could locate. He set up a web and domain called KellyRamer.com, and posted the file in every possible format. It was linked into every University page he could access, and he added in meta-tags for easy searching.

  When he was done, Nordhausen gave a sigh of exhaustion, and went to look for Paul.

  “I made fifty copies,” he said. “Have we changed the future?”

  “I hope so,” said Dorland. “The physical copies are tangible. The probabilities collapse into certainty with each copy you make because the chance of at least one surviving increases, copy by copy.”

  “So, if we go back now and dig up the grave, will the DVD be in it again?”

  “I’m not going to go find out,” Dorland said. “As the pious peasant said, ‘There are some things man is not meant to know, Doktor Frankenstein!’”

  “Fronkensteen!” retorted Nordhausen, and the men laughed, breaking the mood of heaviness that had beset them while they labored to preserve Kelly in the world of certainty.

  Dorland pulled himself out of his seat. “I was right about the contamination,” he said as he eyed a ream of computer printouts.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The alarm was not for your time breach, Robert. In fact, your party with Wilde and company seems to have made little impression on future Meridians. There’s a few inconsistencies in the RAM bank comparison, but nothing serious. The Meridian is clean on that score.”

  “Then what caused the damage?”

  “There was another breach of the continuum, concurrent with your mission, but to another target date altogether. No time to talk about it now thoug
h. First things first. You’ve got to face Maeve.”

  The look Nordhausen gave him was the sum of all fears, but Paul just smiled.

  ~

  The drive to the apartment from the lab was quite different from the trip they had made earlier in the afternoon. Now they were exhausted, hungry, and still filthy from the graveyard. They had both changed from their soaked shirts into fresh lab coats, but their trousers and shoes were still caked with dried mud. Dorland swung by an all night drive through, and they ordered combo meals to go.

  When they got to the apartment, Maeve was already there, waiting in Paul’s car across the street. She seemed very excited, and encouraged by a strong improvement in Kelly’s condition.

  “I don’t know what you two did,” she beamed, “but Kelly is awake now and hungry as a horse! He’s lucid, very focused, and the confusion and disorientation is completely gone.”

  “Thank Robert,” said Paul, pointing at the professor. He told Maeve their idea of publishing the data to the Internet as a way of preserving it.

  “Wasn’t that a security risk?” Maeve suggested.

  “Not really,” said Paul. “To any outsider it’s just a few minutes of footage of Kelly at his desk. Sure, he vanishes at the end, but with special effects being what they are these days, and the amount of junk on the Internet—”

  “Of course!” Maeve smiled warmly, delighted with the solution. “Well it’s already worked some kind of magic. I insisted Kelly stay at the hospital tonight for observation, just to be sure. In fact, I practically had to sit on him to keep him from running over to the lab.”

  “Probably best, but this is great news,” said Robert, clearly relieved.

  After they went up, Robert offered Paul the first shower, and set him up a with aclean tee shirt, a UC Berkeley sweat shirt, and a pair of very loose trousers.

  While Dorland was showering, Lindford made a pot of coffee and Nordhausen took the opportunity of eating his hamburger, to avoid talking with her. She could see that he was at the end of his strength, and that finally sitting down was making the weariness come on, so she was content to wait for a while before they started getting into the matter seriously.

  Dorland came out in a billow of steam, drying his hair with a towel, complaining that the balding Nordhausen should at least have a hairdryer for the benefit of his guests.

  Nordhausen said he didn’t have enough visitors to justify the expenditure, and closed the bathroom door behind himself.

  Dorland, finally warm and dry, sank into the large easy chair to the side of Nordhausen’s desk. The black and white composition books containing the professors hieroglyphics were scattered on the desk top with computer printouts from the Golem report.

  Maeve brought Paul a cup of coffee, and sat in the desk chair. She piled up the notebooks and set them aside without looking at them.

  “Okay, Paul, tell me everything.” Tired or not, he was the project team leader, and he would have to answer for anything that went wrong.

  “Hah, yes, everything,” Dorland began. “Well, I think we have taken care of Kelly’s problem. Your instincts were right that the DVD in the memorial was not safe, but Robert and I have taken care of that. Oh, by the way,” he handed her a handful of DVD’s in a box. “Take these, and put them somewhere, burn a copy on every computer you have, and keep transferring them when you get new ones.”

  She slipped them into her shoulder bag. “So, tell me what you found at the graveyard.”

  Paul spoke reluctantly, “The grave had been dug up, and the work looked relatively recent.”

  “Dug up? By whom?” Maeve was shocked.

  “We have no idea, but the odds are that it was an operative from the future. They dug down, smashed the lid on the box, removed the stuff we put in, and buried it again. It was obvious when we got there, they made no effort to hide it.”

  “Who would do this? And why?” Maeve was bewildered.

  “As to why, no doubt to eliminate Kelly. As to whom? I suppose we can discuss that.”

  “The time travelers who saved Kelly—”

  “—wouldn’t have any reason to want to eliminate him. If that were so, then why would they save him in the first place?”

  “So that means…”

  “Robert believes there are other people moving through time, and if you looked at those reports you would have seen that the alarm keyed on a breach at three past four, this afternoon.”

  That set the two of them to silence for a moment. They heard the shower door slam, and listened to Robert moving about in the bathroom. Shortly, he emerged, also in clean, dry clothes, and seemingly re-energized.

  “Dare I ask what you two have been talking about?”

  Paul and Maeve gazed back at him wearily.

  “Paul tells me that you think other people are moving through time.”

  Robert looked at Paul. “You told her?”

  “Not everything.”

  Maeve was instantly alert. “What?”

  Robert looked pleadingly at his friend. “You tell her.”

  Paul pointed to the professor’s notebooks.

  “Open that notebook, Maeve—no, not the Golem files, the older notebook to the left.”

  Questioningly, she complied. The rows of precise, intricate hieroglyphics marched across the pages. “What is this?”

  “What does it look like to you?” Paul asked.

  “It looks like Egyptian writing.” She looked up blankly. “Who wrote this?”

  Paul looked at the professor. “Robert did. We didn’t know if it would still manifest in this Meridian, but it seems we learn something new about the theory every time it is tested. Apparently the lifeline of a Prime is held inviolate if he is safe in a Nexus during Transformation. I was worried about Paradox, but Robert is safe and sound—at least for the moment.”

  Maeve took in the jargon, understanding, yet clearly still annoyed. “Robert wrote this? Why on earth…” If she had been confused before, she was now totally at a loss.

  Nordhausen stood in silence. Maeve continued to turn, page after page after page, uncomprehending.

  “Robert says he can read those.”

  At that she looked up sharply. “What’s going on here?”

  “Robert went through the Arch,” Paul continued quickly.

  “What?”

  “Robert went through the Arch, and when he came back, he told me something had changed. Oh, he was afraid all this was his fault, and I let him stew for awhile, but the Golems are on to the real culprits, and it has something to do with that writing.” Paul pointed at the professor’s notebooks.

  “Okay, stop right there.” Lindford commanded. “This is too much at once.” She paused, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

  “Okay, one more time. Robert went through the Arch?” She flashed him a dark look, and Nordhausen swallowed hard. “You’re talking about his trip to recover Lawrence’s manuscript at Reading station, yes?”

  “No. I’m talking about his trip to see H.M.S Pinafore in London—1880.”

  Dorland was through helping. He had let the cat out of Schroedinger’s box and he decided to leave the rest to the professor. Nordhausen said, “Yes… I… Well, I went through the Arch, and when I came back something was different, and if I hadn’t gone we wouldn’t even know about it, so I did a good thing after all, and now we have to figure out what to do about it.” He ran out of steam, giving her a deflated look.

  Maeve left him hanging for a few beats.

  “Notwithstanding the fact that I only agreed to let you two start up the project again on your express promise that you would never send a person through it again without my approval,” she began, “you nevertheless secretly, and in violation of your promise to me, sent Robert through the Arch? Robert, of all people? And he did something to change history?”

  “Now wait a second,” Dorland protested. “I didn’t send Robert through, this was all his own secret little plan.”

  “I’m afraid that
’s correct, Maeve. It was just me,” Nordhausen seconded. “Paul knew nothing about it until I told him this afternoon. He got to me just as I was returning.”

  “Well suppose you just tell me now!” She was reddening with anger, secretly believing that the whole of Kelly’s dilemma was to be laid at Nordhausen’s feet.

  Robert related his experience in London once more. This time he minimized his encounter with Wilde and Gilbert, and focused on the British Museum. With some contributions from Dorland, the story was worked out again, and with more details, which Maeve pried out in pointed inquisition.

  Finally they were back again with Maeve and Paul paging through Robert’s hieroglyphic diaries. Maeve had vented her anger at them, but the more she came to realize that Robert’s unauthorized time jaunt had been a lucky windfall for them all, the more she composed herself.

  Paul summed it up. “So if Robert hadn’t followed up his lead on Rasil’s scroll and the hieroglyphics, then we would have never stumbled on the damaged stone—the Rosetta Stone, as he claims it was called. Here, have a look at the data we pulled from the on-line RAM Bank reference. The Golems confirm Robert’s story. The stone was supposed to look like this.” He pointed to the photo on the readout they had obtained earlier. “That’s the heart of it.”

  “The Rosetta Stone!” Robert exulted.

  “Their touchstone,” said Paul. He pointed at the Golem files lying scattered all over Nordhausen’s study table. “He’s on to something, Maeve. The alert we got keyed on another breach in the continuum.

  The professor’s eyebrows raised, wrinkling his forehead with surprise. “When? Does the report have any good data on the time?”

  Paul smiled at him, the light of discovery in his eyes. “You’re going to love this,” he waded in, then jumped. “The temporal date is 1799 and the spatial locus of the breaching point is in the Middle East.”

  “The Middle East?”

  “In Egypt… At a place called Rosetta…”